Sunday, 12 May 2013

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

-- A cable, rope, string, cord, or wire -- A rope used aboard a ship -- A
fishing line -- A clothesline -- A cord or tape used, as by builders or
surveyors, for measuring, leveling, or straightening -- A course of
progress or movement; a route -- A horizontal row of printed or written
words or symbols -- A unit of verse ending in a visual or typographic
break and generally characterized by its length and meter -- Glib or
insincere talk, usually intended to deceive or impress --

Drink this baby: textured photo by Marie Wintzer, 22 August 2010

Drink this baby, it's atomic sodaIt'll blow your mind back to how it was

15 comments:

When Angelica and I were out getting a marriage license one day in March 1968, my grungy little Lower East Side apartment was ransacked by the downstairs neighbour junkies, who came up the fire escape. We had nowhere to stay. Mike had a camp bed in his studio on the Bowery. He lent us that. At our wedding, he sang "I Love You Truly", in a deep rich baritone. Many thanks, Mike.

I still laugh when I get to the end of "Why I Am Not a Painter." The poem is so dense with information and story, yet so open in its movement at the same time. (BTW, I immediately read your comment as a perfect little poem itself & started breaking it into lines in my mind.)

When younger, I wanted to be a painter, went to art school, worked hard but found myself painting the same thing day by day.

Goldberg paints living paintings, of course. Even in a photo you can just about hear the surface breathe.

The conversation caught here: two friends saying ostensively small things, nothing extra, no gobshite nonsense. And Frank having a quiet pop at himself and the poet breed: "It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES."

Ed sure has it with "all these intersections.../I got tears in my eyes." Open-ended as it might be, I always fancied Marie was addressing the poetic line specifically in "A Line," and you have that curious line about prose in the O'Hara poem. Does he question his own poetics?

Thanks for the link to "Atomic Soda." I didn't know where she got that until now. I think it turned up in her work during her relocation to Hiroshima after the Tokyo reactor disaster. That terrible ordeal did, at least, produce some very fine work.

Equally wonderful for someone (like me), with no previous knowledge of these people or places, only knowing the O'Hara poem vaguely in the past, to come upon this game of words and images. It all stands up so beautifully: O'Hara, Goldberg, Wintzer - and Clark, the conductor.

Oooh, waking up to the music of THIS symphony! How can it ever get better than this for me? Thank you so much, Tom! Marie and Frank O'Hara and Michael Goldberg in the same painting on Beyond the Pale, oh my, eyes are being rubbed right now. But yes, it seems to be true! Exit Sardines. Got to love this poem, Tom, your conducting skills know no borders. I am not a poet, I make mice dance. I think I would rather be a poet :-)And you invited Babybird to the party, I couldn't be happier. He is one of my favourites. Dead Bird Sings on Jools Holland makes shivers run down my spine.As ever, thank you (so muchly) for the music, Tom.

-- and there they are, in Marie's green boxes (beautiful photos). I was in the Tibor de Nagy on Saturday, show called "Jane Freilicher / Painter Among Poets," with all kinds of memorabilia (letters, postcards, manuscripts) from and to FO'H, JA, et. alia, including this line from one of Frank's postcards to her: "Life would be so much simpler if it could be entirely spent in visiting places."

5.12

light coming into sky above still dark wall, bird beginning to call on branchin foreground, sound of cars in street

This post is in many ways an illustration of the aesthetic principle (!!) upon which this blog is founded.

Really it all began in a bit of eavesdropping. That idle pastime of the superfluous.

So there we were, in Athens.

(Here comes the gossip bit, what celebrity-memoir poetry blogging is supposed to be all about!)

Socrates was saying, "You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting.

"The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.

"It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever."

"Hmm," said Phaedrus. "In that case, perhaps someone ought to introduce them to one another."

"That's exactly the idea," said Socrates.

"It's possible they might have some interesting things to say to each other, then?"

"Yes. Let's make ourselves small, conceal ourselves behind this column, open our ears, and learn what we can!"

This has been a fantastic blog and comment thread, Tom. I will come back to it many more times.Is it possible that the silent paintings and writings are questioning US? What a present this has been, and still is.

That's a beautiful way to think of it. The words and pictures are here to speak not to each other, but to us. These are gifts. The best gifts change lives. The work of proper receptiveness however must always be up to the recipients. The first step in that work is to be grateful.